what's your advertising budget?

[JustOneUK]

how much do you spend annually on assorted advertising?

and what kind of % returns do you make/expect from that?

[Eagle]

*
More or less nothing. Most of my custom is from referals I'm happy to say. :)

[fastfences]

£3,000. This comprises Yellow Pages, Thomsons Directory, BT Phone Book, weekly local paper advertising and a monthly magazine colour ad'. Oh, and £10.00 with Justone directory.

May sound a lot to some of you, but advertising is my 'shopfront.'

cheers, Nigel

[MinuWeb]

We spend about £700 - 1000 per month on advertising, mostly targetting the local market. (newspaper, magazine, flyers, sponsorship)

We hardly do any online advertising.

[Steve Roberts]

We use direct mail rather than advertising. Although we do carry out some PR stuff with certain publications. Our current spend is about £150,000 pa on direct mail. This generate 0.5% enquiry rate, of wich we convert 1 in 3 enquiries. Because we're selling companies, the potential remuneration is pretty significant (typically £135,000 per deal) and we're doing one deal per week - so the numbers stack up okay.

The higher the profit margin per product/service, the less of an issue the marketing budget becomes (if you follow the logic!)

[JustOneUK]

£7M in sales from £150K
That's a pretty generous return.
I was of the mind a 10 fold return would be healthy.
That's a significant figure you have there.

[Steve Roberts]

£7M in sales from £150K
That's a pretty generous return.
I was of the mind a 10 fold return would be healthy.
That's a significant figure you have there.

Yes, but remember that's not our total sales costs, just the direct mail costs. We employ 5 sales staff, plus we do seminars and other marketing things. As such, our total sales costs are nearer £1m. The original poster, was asking the cost of just advertising not the total sales cost - which is obviously much higher.

[JustOneUK]

Generally one would think the larger your product cost, the less return on advertising investment.

eg: dave the window cleaner spends £5 on leaflets and gets £300 work (pretty good return %)

could it be said that generally for the smaller business a spend of £1000 should return £10,000
sales? is there any facts/studies available anywhere?

[MinuWeb]

It all depends on your aim from the advertising, some places we advertise produce very low returns on actual sales but are good for branding and this increases future sales due to increased customer awareness of the brand.

I would think if very difficult to put a % figure for sales / advertising cost down as it depends on what you are selling and your profit per item / sale.

Advertising also does not guarantee any sales. And really needs to be experimented with on an individual basis by each company that is advertising.

[JustOneUK]

I would think if very difficult to put a % figure for sales / advertising cost down as it depends on what you are selling and your profit per item / sale.

Advertising also does not guarantee any sales. And really needs to be experimented with on an individual basis by each company that is advertising.

Yes you are right. The only way to broadly gauge return on investment is to compare on a like for like basis.

Budget however is a different matter, and at least we can recognise that we have a clear budget leader in this thread :lol:

[moonlion]

We spend about £700 - 1000 per month on advertising, mostly targetting the local market. (newspaper, magazine, flyers, sponsorship)

We hardly do any online advertising.

Did you ever think about online advertising with E-zine ads. Maybe a new option to explore.

[directmarketingadvice]

could it be said that generally for the smaller business a spend of £1000 should return £10,000

How are you looking at this?

Are you differentiating between new, untested marketing and continuing marketing?

What do I mean?

Imagine 2 identical businesses: business A and business B.

They both run ads in their local paper.

Business A's ad is well thought out and well written.

Business B's ad is just a "we do x, give us your business" type ad.

In the following days, business A gets a few enquiries and those enquiries bring in a profit that more than covers the cost of the ad.

Business B: the phone doesn't ring, except for one guy who's shopping for price and decides to go with another company.

Now, company A is likely to run the ad again next week. Company B is likely to dump the ad.

Now, imagine that company A runs the ad every week for a year.

The average return for the 2 companies is:

[(52 x company A profit) + company B return (a negative number that is the cost of the ad)] / 53

i.e. it's heavily skewed towards the successful ad.

However, the return from the new, untested advertising is

company A profit + company B return

which could be either positive or negative, depending on the size of A's profit.

Hope this helps.

Steve

[KPautomotive]

As we have only recently started up I've mainly advertised online for free - I've also made up my own flyers for a car show we're going to at the weekend.

[JustOneUK]

How are you looking at this?

I can't remember mate, because the thread is 9 months old. :D

I think the question should have read more like..

"how much do you generally expect to make if you spend £1000 on advertising", something like that.

I think I was more interested in finding out what people spend as on ongoing monthly consideration for advertising.

Personally my advertising spend/website promotion costs for the past 3 years has been a whopping
ZERO £'s :p

James.